Winesburg, Ohio

a collection of twenty-three short stories by Sherwood Anderson, published in 1919. This series of starkly realistic sketches focuses on the ‘lives of quiet desperation’ of the men and women of a small Midwestern town, seen through the eyes of George Willard, a young reporter. The perspective is of a world divided between increasing industrial modernization and the ‘old individualistic town life’. In these psychological portraits of some of Winesburg's inhabitants, Anderson sought to demonstrate that even poverty-stricken people were as sensitive to emotions as the rich and successful.